hilly autumn ride

Laura OLPH's description of the ride for today was brief:

This is a hilly, social ride with a coffee break. We will stop for pictures. 

It was, and we did.

First, though, it was cold when we started. I had scraped frost off the car when I was loading it, and the car thermometer registered 37°F when I turned it off (and it got to over 60°F before the end of the ride; how do you dress for that?).

Still, we were starting from Lambertville, and the Lambertville Halloween decorations are appearing:

I was early enough to get these before the ride start.

Ricky G, Tom H, Peter G, Andrew A, and Martin G comprised the rest of the crew. And yes, we stopped for pictures. We got these on the bridge on Lower Creek Road:

The dad above was fishing with his toddler son. He said he might get out for a ride later in the day after it had warmed up a bit . At the time, that sounded like a better idea than we had.

It's not a great year for foliage. Some trees are already bare, others still green. What colors there are seem muted.

We had a climb from Lower Creek to Upper Creek, then to Hammer, but then we were on the ridge and rolled along for a while. Laura stopped to get pictures of the white horse (Winter Larry is taken with white horses) before we got to Pittstown.

We briefly missed a turn in Pittstown, which was forgivable, because we got a sight of this excellent MG:

Crossing the bridge to Black Eddy (this is much more sensible than either rolling down Bridgeton Hill Road, with the terrifying drop and the left turn at the bottom, or trying to climb in all the traffic):

And then, on the way in, was this other bit of automotive wonderfulness. I didn't catch the make:

That stop at Black Eddy is great; if it were a bit closer, I'm sure TEW and I would be driving out every now and then. We had a chat with some friendly motorcyclists (no, that's apparently not an oxymoron) and then headed back.

I'm grateful it had warmed up by the time Martin had a flat (I'm sure he was, too):

Now, you can do a flat run from Black Eddy all the way back to Lambertville... but that's not the Hill Slug way. We went east at Frenchtown and climbed up Horseshoe Bend, then Lambertville Headquarters to Seabrook back to town.

Ride page.

Alas, rain for tomorrow; I've cancelled my planned ride. Chores and maintenance on TEW's bike, instead.